Are the big, all-purpose job boards dinosaurs from a bygone age on the verge of extinction? Once the vanguard of online recruiting, is their dominance now in eclipse, challenged by smaller, nimbler, better-adapted niche competitors and platforms built on social interactions? Don’t bet on it.
The Internet job market is still, evolutionarily speaking, quite young. We categorize it now as the end of Stage 2, entering Stage 3. The large job boards were clearly the big players in Stage 1, largely because they were the first movers and there wasn’t much competition. Certainly, that stage has come and gone. In Stage 2 the market has fragmented into additional large boards, plus job aggregators, plus geographic, job level, job category, association, and other special interest boards. How many are there now? I’ve seen counts ranging from a few hundred serious players to as many as 100,000 if you count every trivial site in the world posting even a few jobs. Even on the low end, this constitutes a fair size mess; and it’s way more than even the most conscientious recruiter can track or use intelligently.
Stage 3 will witness the evolution from an emphasis on data aggregation – job listings, resume postings and job applications – to the speed and efficiency with which job matches are made. There are some interesting aspects to this.
First, job seekers are making themselves increasingly visible. LinkedIn and Facebook are two early facilitators of this trend. Personal websites are now quite common, and it is de rigueur for serious photographers, designers, actors, painters, and other creative types to post Internet portfolios. Scores of thousands of small business people also have company websites that are as much about them as about the services they sell. Personal Internet portfolios like these are now mainstream and on the way to becoming universal.
Second, data quality will improve, meaning that job descriptions will become more complete and resumes more accurate. Am I dreaming? Well perhaps in the short term, but there are such clear advantages to the employers and candidates who provide comprehensive, accurate, information that eventually best practice will raise the bar from its current inch-high level. Top talent competitors and top candidates have already figured this out.
Third, the two initial connections between job seekers and employers are now clearly:
1) Job seekers vet employers via the employer’s website
2) Employers vet job seekers via the latter’s personal web presence
For conscientious recruiters and top candidates, this procedure is now routine for upper level positions and will become standard for other positions as soon as tech people can figure out how to efficiently automate the seek info/report/data merge function and build it into their ATS systems.
Fourth, service companies touting faster, more accurate connections will proliferate, serving job seekers who need to present their most accomplished and attractive face to the world and haven’t the time, expertise or talent to do that work themselves. If you are an ambitious working professional, the amateur Facebook posting will no longer cut it.
Top executives will pay thousands for quality portrait and candid photographs, portfolio assembly, audio and video clips of presentations and speeches, work samples, and blog postings, all kept current, and all presented on professional quality websites. Those with thinner wallets will be offered one-stop, economy packages: “Personal Website with Video Resume, only $599. Two weeks only!”
Fifth, employers will realize that the corporate website is the centerpiece of the early stage job seeker experience and a powerful embodiment of the corporate brand. Maybe 100 large, successful companies already understand this and thousands more will learn it over the next few years. Hundreds of service companies already exist who can make these upgrades, and will happily absorb the additional work.
Sixth, individual job postings will shift from job boards – both general and niche – back to the corporate website. Why? Because the current, Stage 2 system is inefficient. It is too expensive and complicated to post individual jobs to every worthwhile job site, thus corporate recruiters are already making compromises with every posting. In addition, the aggregate Internet traffic patterns of millions of individual job seekers are simply too complex to map efficiently. The only way for one company to track large numbers of them for the duration of a recruitment courtship (see below) is to have one central meeting place.
Job postings to high-traffic job boards will not disappear, but they will become more general and brand oriented, intended to drive potential candidates to corporate sites for detailed specifics.
Seventh, the just in time corporate recruiting model that now dominates will shift to a long lead recruiting model, first for hard-to-find candidates and eventually for most managerial, professional and executive positions. Long lead recruitingTM will emphasize maximizing the flow of internal referrals and passive candidates through an extended series of progressive interactions that can stretch over months or even years. The model will follow established CRM principles and technology that is already familiar to thousands of corporate sales and business development departments. (We’ll explain more in a subsequent UPDATE.)
To return to our initial question: are the big job boards dying? It’s much too soon to tell. If they become stodgy and out of touch as Stage 2 evolves into Stage 3, and the market shifts away from them, of course they will die off. But, as far as I can tell, these successful Stage 1 companies are very aware of the rapidly changing job market and are working hard to adapt. Sal Iannuzzi and Matt Ferguson aren’t clueless. They may very well decide to move their companies away from the data aggregation business towards the job connection business. If they do, they can support that transition with potent assets: lots of traffic, money, talent, and mindshare. Maybe some of the big boards will disappear, but I would argue that as a breed their day has not yet come and gone.
Related Staffing.org Articles:
Internet Best Practices
Internet Best Practices: The Widening Gap
Mastering Internet Recruiting - Problems in the Recruiting Funnel
Mastering Internet Recruiting - Part II: What Candidates Want
Mastering Internet Recruiting - Part I
Other Sources:
The Impending Death of Job Boards - Blogs - Community - ERE.net
Free Job Matching Launches Monday For Employers and Seekers
New International Job Board Network Launches
Assessment and Job Boards: Two Years Later
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